Skyboxes a-plenty difficult

[Takeoffyouhoser]

What skybox did the Demo Map use, the one where it was snowing? Does Radiant ahve this texture??

 

If not, I downloaded a few i'd like from here http://amethyst7.gotdoofed.com/

 

my only question is, how does one use a second hand skybox?

What do I need to do to make them work after I download them?

[Leslie Judge]

About the weather

 

The demo used the ice skybox. It's in the Skies texture set.

 

But snowing was made by an effect called fx_snow. To make an outside scene with snowing or rain, you have to make your scene, then add one or more brush that covers all the space you want see snowing or raining, and apply the system/outside shader on them.

 

You can read a tutorial at Rich Diesal's Mapping University.

 

There is a little mistake we already discussed with Rich. You can not make a map with snow and rain at the same time, because if you put only one fx_snow into the map there will be snow in all the system/outside brushes. Even if you don't put that fx_snow inside the brushes. If you put in fx_rain too, there will be snow and rain in all the system/outside brushes.

 

 

About the custom sky boxes

 

You need the six pictures and a sky shader. The best, if you go to your base/shaders directory, and look into the skies.shader. There can be found all the skyboxes like bespin, yavin, kejim_light (this is with light from the sky), etc.

 

Make your own shader file and copy one of the skies for example bespin. It's like this:

 

textures/skies/bespin
{
qer_editorimage	textures/skies/sky.tga
surfaceparm	sky
surfaceparm	noimpact
surfaceparm	nomarks
notc
q3map_nolightmap
skyParms	textures/skies/bespin 512 -
}

 

Now you have to modify the first line's middle part if you don't want your skybox to appear in the Skies texture set. If it's OK for you then leave it. If you change it, don't forget to create a directory with the same name in the textures directory.

 

The third part of the line is the name of your shader.

 

The most important is the last line. There is the path to the six files that make up the skybox. As you can see there is only the relative path from base directory and only the base of the files' name. So if you have a morningsky_dn, etc. you have to write only morningsky.

 

If you want your sky to emit light you have to add the following line after the qer_editorimage line:

 

q3map_surfacelight <intensity>

 

With this the whole sky will emit light. If you want sunlight, then you can combine the above line with this one:

 

q3map_sun <red> <green> <blue> <intensity> <degrees> <elevation>